U.S. weighs a possible class-action tobacco suit - Business - International Herald Tribune

A U.S. federal judge is considering whether tobacco companies should be tried on the question of whether they deceived smokers for years about the safety of "light" cigarettes.

The case, filed in 2004, is part of the latest legal assault against tobacco companies. After the companies successfully warded off litigation by people claiming to have been injured by smoking, plaintiffs' lawyers have turned their attention to attacking the companies for defrauding consumers by selling light cigarettes.

After hearing a day of arguments Wednesday, the judge asked lawyers for the plaintiffs how they were determining the number of smokers potentially affected and possible damages.

In the case, known as Schwab after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Schwab, the lawyers asserted that cigarette makers had deceived smokers into thinking that light cigarettes, representing 45 percent of the market, were safer or less addicting.

Judge Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn is expected to decide within several weeks whether to grant class-action status.

While many of these so-called light cases have been unsuccessful, the Schwab case follows an opinion last month by a federal judge in the District of Columbia, who found that cigarette companies had engaged in decades of fraud and racketeering, including misleading smokers and concealing information about the health risks of light cigarettes.

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That ruling, by Judge Gladys Kessler in a case brought by the Justice Department, was a victory for tobacco companies in that they did not have to pay a possible $10 billion in damages. But the 1,600-page opinion was a searing indictment of conduct by the companies over the last 40 years.

Plaintiffs' lawyers in the Schwab case want to rely on those findings.

"The tobacco industry has foisted a huge deception on the public and the public health community," Michael Hausfeld, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said at the hearing Wednesday. "They understood they were selling death but they had to disguise it."

Attorneys for the companies argued that the case should not be certified as a class action because differences in the way people smoked cigarettes could affect the amount of tar and nicotine taken in. They also argued that people smoked cigarettes for a variety of reasons and that many people smoked light cigarettes because they liked the taste, not for health reasons or as part of an attempt to quit smoking.

"This is a tiny class of people," said Theodore Grossman, an attorney for R.J. Reynolds, the second-largest U.S. tobacco company. He also said the plaintiffs had failed to show which people were relying on light cigarettes for health reasons.

Tobacco analysts on Wall Street have been expecting Weinstein, who is 84 and has earned a reputation as a champion of consumer rights, to certify the case as a class action.

But at the conclusion of the hearing, Weinstein asked pointed questions of the plaintiffs' attorneys to explain how they would determine how many people might have been defrauded by the marketing of light cigarettes and how they would calculate damages.